19 January 2008

CA (Interviewer): Dr. Dembski, ID has come a very long way since its inception; and ID proponents are making inroads in a vast array of scientific disciplines such as astronomy, biology, and chemistry. How has your own work in mathematics (namely, The Design Inference and No Free Lunch) helped or influenced the development of novel ways of doing science?

WD (Dembski): It’s too early to tell what the impact of my ideas is on science. To be sure, there has been much talk about my work and many scientists are intrigued (though more are upset and want to destroy it), but so far only a few scientists see how to take these ideas and run with them.

WD (Fortsetzung von oben): There’s a reason for this slow start. My work in The Design Inference was essentially a work on the philosophical foundations of probability theory, trying to understand how to interpret probabilities in certain contexts. This led naturally to some ideas about information and the type of information used in drawing design inferences. My book No Free Lunch was a semi-popular overview of where I saw the ID movement headed on the topic of information. The hard work of developing these ideas into a rigorous information-theoretic formalism for doing science really began only in 2005 with some unpublished papers on the mathematical foundations of intelligent design that appeared on my website (www.designinference.com).

Später führt er noch aus:

"As I explained in the preface of that book [No Free Lunch], its aim was to provide enough technical details so that experts could fill in details, but enough exposition so that the general reader could grasp the essence of my project. The book seems to have succeeded with the general reader and with some experts, though mainly with those who were already well-disposed toward ID. In any case, it became clear after that publication of that book that I would need to fill in the mathematical details myself, something I have been doing right along."

WD (Fortsetzung von oben): With the formation of Robert Marks's Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June 2007 (Marks is a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University), and work by him and me on the conservation of information (several papers of which are available at http://www.EvoInfo.org), I think ID is finally in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information. This, I believe, will have a large impact on science.

WD: The Evolutionary Informatics Lab: www.EvoInfo.org. I knew of another ID lab that another faculty member at Baylor (not Robert Marks) was intent on starting, but with the witch-hunt against Marks, that’s not going to happen any time soon.

CA: Do you feel that we are on the verge of proposing a neo-saltation theory on the smorgasbord of ideas?

WD: I don’t think the evidence supports universal common descent, but there are design theorists such as Michael Behe who think that it does. A saltational theory of life’s diversification is therefore a design-theoretic option, but it is not the only option, and I don’t expect to see any one position gain ascendancy within the ID movement any time soon.

CA: Amidst all the animosity and criticisms written about your work, what is your motivation for continuing this ambitious research program?

WD: The work itself is immensely satisfying and intellectually stimulating. Moreover, I see those who seek to shut it down as intolerant dogmatists who encapsulate a tyranny that I despise. So I get to see myself as both a scientific researcher and as a freedom fighter—a rare combination.